The argument around abortion rights is not pro-life vs. pro-choice. It’s anti-choice vs. pro-choice. You can be pro-life AND pro-choice. If you want to be. It’s your CHOICE.

NARAL Pro-Choice America explains what it means to be pro-choice perfectly on their website:

“Being pro-choice means protecting women’s access to safe, legal abortion. It also means working on ways to help reduce the need for abortion, like improving access to birth control. And it means supporting women who choose to carry their pregnancies to term.”

I am not going to argue about when I think a fetus becomes a person. I’m not writing this to change your opinion on that. I’m writing this because we all have different opinions about that, and abortion, and we should be free to make our own choices about what we do with our bodies. I will say this, however: in many cases, people are in the “pro-life & anti-abortion” camp because of their religious beliefs. That’s fine. I have no quarrel with that. But, this country was founded, at the very basic level, as a place to practice freedom of religion. We also practice separation of church and state. Therefore, if you want to control whether or not someone else (read: who is not you) has an abortion, it can have NOTHING to do with your religious beliefs. You cannot force your religious beliefs on another person. And since an unborn fetus is not a citizen over the age of 18 and therefore has no bearing on politics, abortion rights should not be a political issue. They should ONLY be a medical one. But, unfortunately, this is not the case. Roe v. Wade was 32 years ago, yet we are still arguing about it.

I am so sick and tired of politicians, particularly male politicians, trying to control what I do with my body, trying to control how I reproduce (if I were to choose to do such a thing, but that is a whole different discussion).

I’m tired of hearing politicians (in particular, male Republican politicians) make complete idiots of themselves when they mistakenly try to make excuses for rape whenever the question of aborting a rape pregnancy comes up. I know it is not all of them. But I’ve heard it happen enough times that it makes me sick to my stomach, and I’m tired of it. It scares me more than I’d like to admit that people like that are capable of making decisions about my abortion rights. I am thrilled that the reason the 20 week abortion ban vote was thrown out because they couldn’t define rape properly, but the fact that it was on the table on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade infuriates me. We made this decision already. Why can’t people just let it go?

On that note, why do men have a say in this at all? In the reproductive process, they have one job, at the very beginning, and then they can walk away, if they really want to. Physically, that is. They don’t have to endure the 9+ months of a fetus growing inside them, and all the hormonal changes and physical discomfort and pain that come with it. They don’t have to worry that something could go wrong during delivery causing their death. So again, I ask, why do men get to vote on abortion rights?

I’m not saying men can’t have an opinion about it. People can have opinions about anything they want. And if a man has helped make his partner pregnant, he can absolutely tell her what he wants to happen next. But ultimately, the woman should be allowed to make the decision about whether or not she carries it to term. It’s her body, and her life, that will be affected the most in the next 9 months.

If we have to continue to make abortion rights a political discussion, the only people allowed to vote on it should be women. No uterus: no vote. I should be that simple.

It boils down to this: if you are not my doctor, your opinions about what I do with the contents of my uterus do not matter. And even if you are my doctor, I expect you only to express opinions that may affect MY health and safety.

I know nothing will come of this little blog post, but this is one issue I have very strong feelings about, and every time this topic comes up I feel like a broken record. So I thought I should write it down. Maybe someday, someone reading it will make the switch from anti-choice to pro-choice, and the world will be a little safer.